Week 4 at the Donohue Lab

Hi this is Meg again, writing about my fourth week working in the Donohue lab at Duke University, where we are researching the different effects of water potentials on seed germination. As I described in my last post, on Monday we finished rinsing seeds from Lien’s project. Then for the rest of Monday we had to census seeds from both from my experiment and Lien’s.

Tuesday morning, we had to head out to the field site in order to weed so that other plants wouldn’t affect the growth of the experimental plants. However, the field is ridiculously overgrown, with weeds taller than I am. As a result, the weeding was pretty intensive and it took us 2 hours to clear out a tiny area. Also, because North Carolina can get extremely hot and humid by around 9 or 10 in the morning, we went out into the field at 6 am and worked until 8:30. Once we finally stopped working, I went back to my apartment to change out of my muddy and dirty clothes and then headed over to the lab. For the rest of the day I censused our experiments. After lunch though, Lien and I met with the postdoc, Tarek, to discuss the analysis of our data. Basically this ended being a 2 our graduate level statistics class, but I still successfully followed along, and was pretty interested by the end.

Inside of chamber with plates

Chamber where plates are kept

On Wednesday, luckily we didn’t have to go to the field again. However we still had to census all day. In addition, we had another 2 hour meeting about analyzing data.

Then, Thursday morning, it wasn’t required, but Lien and I volunteered to help in the field again, meaning another really long day. When we returned to the lab, we censused some more. Then just like the other days this week, we had another meeting. This one was the longest yet and it went over 2 hours and 30 minutes. By the end of the meeting, Lien and I were visibly exhausted, so Bri let us leave an hour early.

Microscope used for censusing

Sheet used to census

On Friday and throughout the weekend, we just censused during the day since we had finished data analysis and field work for the week.

Once again, this week has been exhausting. However, all this work has been pretty enjoyable and has helped me to stay occupied in the lab. As I said last week, I prefer these busy weeks to the fairly slow weeks that I had when I first began working in the lab.